Presun Dewan (Univ. North Carolina) and Rajesh Hegde (Mircosoft Research) present an interesting approach to resolve version conflicts that occur in distributed software development. It is based on an automatic notification about potential conflicts based on an observation of the current user activities in distributed software development environments. The notification mechanism is combined with synchronous communication tools and automatic watchdaemons such that users can resolve the conflicts immediatly or at a later stage.

Although this application area is slightly different from the Ecospace areas, the presented approach has a relevance for our concepts on integration of different shared workspace systems, as well as the support for online/offline work on shared documents.